Background and Purpose

Background and Purpose

Title IX, a federal civil rights statute prohibiting sex discrimination in education, has been in effect since 1972. One key requirement is that schools receiving any federal funding – all public schools as well as most colleges and universities – provide equitable opportunities for female and male students to participate in competitive athletics. Pennsylvania school districts, with a few notable exceptions, appear to be out of compliance with the law.

To monitor Title IX compliance, the Women’s Law Project advocated for a bill, passed by the Pennsylvania legislature, requiring school districts to report annual statistics on their athletic opportunities by sex, as well as by race and ethnicity. To date, the Department of Education has posted data for three years (2012-13, 2013-14, and 2014-15) with a new set of data (2015-16) expected early in 2017. While the reports provide a wealth of raw data, in their current form they can be interpreted and analyzed only after time-consuming manual data processing.

By developing and publicizing the FAIR:PLAY application, we hope to create a statewide community that takes action to achieve fair play in Pennsylvania school athletics. The application will serve parents, students, school administrators, coaches, journalists, lawyers, and other stakeholders, giving them fast and easy insight into the performance of individual schools and how each school performs against countywide and statewide averages. The web application will:

• Be built using the Bootstrap (front end) and Django (data import) frameworks;
• Be hosted on the new website of the Women’s Law Project;
• Interface with Excel spreadsheets posted by the Pennsylvania Department of Education. (Each new data set will be scrubbed manually before importing.)

This initiative of the Women’s Law Project is made possible through the generous support of the FISA Foundation.